Preface to Volume 12 (2001)

With The Age of Johnson, Volume 12, the editors
welcome a number of long-time contributors to our editorial
board: James G. Basker of Barnard College; Robert DeMaria, Jr.,
of Vassar College; Robert Folkenflik of the University of
California, Irvine; Dustin Griffin of New York University;
Nicholas Hudson of the University of British Columbia; Anne C.
McDermott of the University of Birmingham; Karen O'Brien of the
University of Warwick; Catherine N. Parke of the University of
Missouri; Allan Reddick of Universität Zürich; and
Richard Wendorf of The Boston Athenæum. Our editorial board
is now more than three times as large as it was at the time of
Volume 1, reflecting the constant changes in the scholarship of
eighteenth-century England in the last fifteen years.

The contents of Volume 12 underscore these changes in a number
of ways. We include the longest essay we have ever printed,
Thomas M. Curley's penetrating study of Johnson and the Irish.
Nearly as long is Gloria Sybil Gross's contribution on Johnson
and Jane Austen. Austen's single most famous sentence, the
opening of Pride and Prejudice, has long been
recognized as Johnsonian (the source is Rambler
115); Professor Gross gives us a much richer sense of Austen's
debt to Johnson. There will be more to come when her essay
appears, next year, as part of her book on the subject. Volume 12
also contains three pairs of essays. Two are on the notion of
Johnson's putative Jacobitism, the first by Niall MacKenzie, the
second an effort at refutation by Howard Weinbrot. Two more, by
Arthur H. Cash and Melvyn New, present striking new readings of
works by Laurence Sterne. Finally, there is a pairing of essays
on new directions in eighteenth-century literary studies by
Martin C. Battestin and, responding to him, Jill Campbell. Freya
Johnston and Betty Rizzo contribute new essays on aspects of
Johnson, Dr. Johnston on the Journey to the Western Islands,
Professor Rizzo on Johnson and the Grevilles. Finally, James G.
Basker continues a subject he first discussed in Volume 11, with
a further article on Johnson and abolitionism.

We have long sought to encourage definitive essays about
eighteenth-century studies; so, too, we try to make a review in
our pages as close to definitive as we can. In Volume 12,
therefore, we publish William McCarthy's review essay on the
first five volumes of The Piozzi Letters. And, among
the two dozen reviews in this volume (our largest number ever),
all of them detailed, several stand out for their unusual depth
and learning: Barry Baldwin's review of Scott Evans's Samuel
Johnson's "General Nature," John Radner's review of Peter
Martin's Life of James Boswell, James Gray's review
of the latest Cambridge Companion, Steven N. Zwicker's
Cambridge Companion to English Literature,
16501740, William Edinger's review of Jonathan
Kramnick's Making the English Canon, and John
Abbott's review of William Zachs's First John
Murray. This brief accounting can only hint at the riches
of almost two hundred pages of reviews. Scholarly book reviews do
not rate indexing in most of the standard bibliographies, yet
they are are substantial scholarly undertakings. Our aim is to
make every review in The Age of Johnson a definitive
statement on the state of learning as displayed by the book under
review.

The editors gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance of
the Department of English and the School of Arts and Sciences of
the University of Pennsylvania.